To get the map round the right way and bring back under one roof various streams of my writing.

Monday, March 13, 2017

Korea: Trump back in the bottle; too much in the bottle but no war this year.

I drafted this text below on 9 March 2017 for another blog but was asked to rewrite it because it contained too many links for a blog. I declined to rewrite. In the era of Trump it is essential that we maximise links, not just assert from whatever claimed status.Since I wrote this the impeachment of the President of the Republic of Korea has been confirmed by the court. A presidential election must now be held by 9 May 2017. There is a possibility that a new president may be more open to the DPRK. The consequences for relations with the USA are not clear. That's a new subject for separate treatment.SKIP TO THE END IF YOU JUST WANT CONCLUSIONS

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In January 2016, candidate Trump argued that South Korea was going to have to do more to defend itself. In March 2016 Trump argued that South Korea and Japan should pay their share of defence and consider developing their own nuclear weapons.

This report in The Guardian emphasises the expanded character of the 2016 exercises and reports that the DPRK believes the drills reportedly now include training designed to prepare troops for the invasion of the North’s capital and “decapitation strikes” aimed at killing top leadership.

In thinking about the apparent assassination of Kim Jong-un’s half-brother Kim Jong-nam in Kuala Lumpur with VX applied to the skin, there is context of that Republican Party platform advocacy of regime change, of DPRK apprehensions about the changing nature of US-ROK exercises to include preemptive decapitation of the leadership in Pyongyang ... AND ALSO the ruckus attending the 2014 US comedy The Interview about assassination Kim Jong-un, including reprisal against Sony but where the fictional CIA plan was to assassinate with Ricin. Compare VX and Ricin here. Underscore this: the ruthless, cutthroat, authoritarian dynasty in the DPRK is currently ruled by a less senior family member, Kim Jong-un, than the reluctant prince, his half brother, now assassinated, perpetrators not legally determined. The more senior, playboy Kim Jong-nam, had been living mainly inside the Peoples Republic of China. Both, as is the pattern of their family for male descendants, Swiss educated. Edward VIII, say hello to Stalin. Kim Jong-nam say hello in heaven or hell to Lin Biao. Deng Xiaoping, which of these four will you exclude from a bridge game? (Someone of more classical education might name the relevant Shakespeare.)

The new US Defense Secretary James Mattis went swiftly to Seoul and Tokyo to give assurances on 2 February of continued stable support and spoke with the ROK Defence Minister on the first day of the current exercises, including expressing appreciation of acquisition of a golf course by the ROK government for location of the THAAD missile system. The long-anticipated deployment of THAAD was announced on 6 March, the day after the firing of four missiles by the DPRK into the Sea of Japan. The missiles were nothing new (nor was the attendant media hysteria) and their firing undoubtedly enabled all sides to test reaction and counter-reaction to such event, when everyone was on alert with the current exercises. See these links at allthingsnuclear and 38North.

38North is a coherent advocate for negotiation by the US with the DPRK, but such does not seem feasible in the current situation in Washington, probably also Pyongyang (we have knowns about the US, mainly unknowns about the DPRK).

There has been no formal end to the Korean War (1950-53). Every day, year by year, a pantomime of hostility and balance and occasional incident is played out in the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom in the Demilitarised Zone, dead centre of this extraordinary continuing gamesmanship. Book a visit.

Sound familiar? Source
The point is not what he had in mind, but how he was perceived.

Whatever later quibbling, Acheson made the speech and it was open to interpretation at the time that US support for South Korea was less than firm. North Korea launched a full attack on the south on 25 June 1950. It is reasonable to consider that the DPRK this year considered it appropriate to test the resolve of Trump... unless you consider the North Koreans simply mad, in which case please also consider Trump simply mad. Neither is true, though each side bewildering from time to time. Trump says he seeks to bewilder, so I think does the DPRK.

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So where is the balance this month?

· • Trump has been put back in the bottle of established US security policy and machinery on Northeast Asia. US military posture is sharper.

· • THAAD is in place in South Korea, with a little action by the DPRK to make it easy, much to the fury of China.

· • China is a major target in US high policy focus on Korea, as it was in 1950. There are nuclear weapons on the table.

· • If China ever had any notion that Kim Jong-nam could be a replacement for Kim Jong-un, that game is over. We have a neglected/ignored/avoided framework of DPRK apprehensions in which to find understanding of the murder of Kim Jong-nam.

· • There isn’t going to be a real war this year: I have revised my perspective away from anticipation of war in preparing this note.

· • We need to watch the election campaign in the ROK. The doorway to not-war is via the relationship between Seoul and Pyongyang, not the big powers around them.

this (in 2017) is a new blog...

The word 'cephalophoria' suggested itself to me, is my own invention, as meaning "love of free mindedness". St Denis, my name saint who apparently could not spell, probably a common enough thing in the third century CE, was a cepalophore. That is a member of a small group of christian saints who somewhat prior to the manner of M Python, carried on doing what they were doing after their heads were cut off. Much impressing ladies for a bit, see here and below, St Denis on the wall of Notre Dame de Paris heading out of town after an encounter with the unwilling.

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I have worked through a number of blogs since 2000. I have had some eight domain names registered for different projects, of which only 'A Place of Info' remains. It resides in a storage space at ipower.com, on an internet superhighway in the USA. That storage space contains legacy folders of such projects previously 'live' with their own domain names. Here are two of them:

St Denis de Paris

A case of severe independent-mindedness - a cephalophore - heading out of Paris still preaching to closely admiring women, after an encounter with the unwilling circa 250CE. (image borrowed from Cool Stuff in Paris of Manning Leonard Krull, click on photo.)